How To Root Your Motorola Atrix Quickly And Easily

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The Motorola Atrix isn’t launching officially until June, but I’ve been playing with one for a week or so now, and I’ve just managed to root it after a frustrating search through old and half-arsed bits of information floating about the internet. Here’s the complete step-by-step guide on how to do it.

Rooting your Atrix lets you give Motorola and Telstra the finger by granting you complete control over the phone, extending functionality that you wouldn’t have otherwise (like removing bloatware), and is a prerequisite for installing a custom ROM. There are other root methods out there, but this one definitely works with the Telstra-issued Atrix that will be officially hitting stores on June 7.

At this point in time, the Atrix can only be rooted on a Windows machine. The instructions below are specifically for rooting the Atrix on a Windows 7 computer, and does not install or “flash” any custom ROMs. Remember – rooting removes the limitations placed by carriers and manufacturers that were put on the phone for your own good, and therefore introduces the possibility of bricking your phone and rendering it unusable. Proceed at your own risk.

1. Download the USB drivers relevant to your Windows 7 machine (32-bit or 64-bit).
2. Make sure your Atrix has an SD card.
3. Make sure your Atrix is unplugged from the computer.

4. On your Atrix, go to Settings -> Applications -> Development -> tick “USB debugging”.
5. Plug your Atrix to your computer via the USB cable.
6. Pull down the notification drawer on your Atrix and tap “USB connection”. Select “none” and press OK.
7. Unplug your Atrix and reboot it. Plug the phone back into your computer with the USB cable.
8. Extract the contents of this .rar file onto your computer.
9. Go to the extracted folder and double click on the “SevensPrep” batch file. This will launch a command prompt that installs Gingerbreak and System Recovery onto your Atrix. Follow the prompts.

10. When the prompt closes, open the Gingerbreak app in your Atrix’s app drawer. Tap “Root device”. It may take a few minutes for the phone to reboot.
11. After the phone reboots, go to your Atrix’s app drawer and open the System Recovery app. Tap “Install Recovery”.
12. You will get a Superuser prompt. Make sure the “Remember” box is ticked and hit “Allow”. It will then tell you that installation has completed.

That’s it! Your Atrix is now rooted! Go ahead and download some root-only apps (my favourites are Root Explorer, Screen Grabber and Titanium Backup).

[XDA Developers] [imgclear]


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